Foxit PDF Creator: good basic PDF creation

Currently there is a glut of free PDF creator/writer software on the internet. At the other end of the spectrum lies Adobe Acrobat. However, even the Standard version of Acrobat (Version X) now costs fairly hefty €422 inc. VAT and the Pro version costs a whopping €626. Don’t get me wrong, Acrobat is a super product with great functionality (particularly in the area of change-tracking), but €422 is a lot if you’re someone who just wants to output the odd document as a PDF.

I tried a load of different free PDF creators and guess what? They were largely dreadful.

However, Foxit PDF Creator is a simple, effective tool that doesn’t muck-up your formatting in the PDFs it outputs, embeds fonts nicely, and it only costs $29.99 (€21.66 at today’s conversion rate). It doesn’t come with any editing functions – it just produces a PDF – but it has a decent number of output options and does a good job for a good price.

Note: Since Office/Visio 2007 SP2 (or pre-SP2 with a patch) there has been the option to save a file in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Visio as a PDF. This does a decent job. However, to output web pages, email, or other documents you’ll generally need a PDF creator unless the software you’re using comes with a PDF output option (e.g. WordPerfect, yuk!).

For more see: http://www.foxitsoftware.com

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